A well-brought-up suburban young woman of the ’50s ought not to be depicted as brazenly owning a diaphragm. Yet he had already published “Goodbye, Columbus,” a collection of stories that included “Eli, the Fanatic,” “Defender of the Faith” and “The Conversion of the Jews.” Even before the implosion of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he was notorious - most markedly among Jews - for the shaming and defaming of Jews. It began first with the fairly conventional praise of “Letting Go” and “When She Was Good,” Roth’s two earliest novels, when he was still under the influence of the graduate student’s devotion to the classic quasi-Jamesian propriety that defined Literature as hallowed. To imagine him without fame is to strip him bare. Roth was never to be a mute inglorious Milton. And Blake Bailey’s comprehensive life of Philip Roth - to tell it outright - is a narrative masterwork both of wholeness and particularity, of crises wedded to character, of character erupting into insight, insight into desire, and desire into destiny. Its name today is Biography its nature is that of Dostoyevskian magnitude.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |